Cafe Coffee
by lightingpaperlanterns
Summary: Castle decides that it might be time to finally go out for coffee. Set  and written  after 'Countdown' and before 'One Life To Lose'


As the elevator doors opened, Kate briefly and imperceptibly looked up from her desk across the bullpen to see if he was there yet. She'd been doing it all morning. In fact, she did it most every morning, and she's perfected glancing up just enough so that it didn't look like she'd moved.

He was finally there. She checked the time on her computer screen – it was half past nine, later than what was usual. But then, they'd cleared their last case last night, and there hadn't been any new body this morning. All they were going to be doing was paperwork – which was why he didn't even need to be there at all. But he always came, and she'd become strangely aware lately that it was because of his feelings towards her rather than just being thorough with his research.

He sat down in the seat beside her desk that he'd claimed as his own. Kate looked at him through her eyelashes.

Something was wrong.

"Where's the coffee?" she asked him, looking around her desk. "Castle?"

"I was thinking," he said, keeping his eyes on anything but her.

"Are you actually going to tell me what you're thinking this time?" she snapped before blushing furiously. "Sorry, that was harsh... I mean... You were thinking...?"

He looked at her puzzled: had she picked up on his change of mind the day of the bomb? He shrugged it off though, and continued, "We've never actually gone out for coffee."

"What's your point?" Beckett didn't like where this was going.

"My point is, maybe we should. We've been ...friends for two years now, and we haven't gone out and had a coffee once?"

"We've been to the bar?" she said, immediately trying to get out of it. The fact remained that Beckett did want to go out with him, just the two of them with no interruptions. But there were a couple of problems. First, was that Ryan, Esposito, Lanie and Captain Montgomery would give her shit for weeks. The second was that whenever they were out somewhere and it wasn't something to do with work, work always found a way to interrupt.

The third was the fact that Castle believed she was still going out with Josh, or, as Castle referred to him, 'Doctor Motorcycle Boy'. She smiled in spite of herself at the nickname before realising what she was doing and stopped.

"A bar and a cafe are two completely different things," he said. "Come on, you know you want to."

She tried to find some way to get out of leaving with him.

Silently, he stood up, slung his jacket over his arm, and extended his hand for her to take. Closing her eyes, Beckett took it, and he held it while she stood up and got her own blazer. As soon as she was standing, though, he released it, and they walked back across the bullpen to the elevator. And she found that she liked the way that her hand felt in his. It was right, somehow.

"So," she said, interrupting their silent walk about five minutes later. "Where are we going?"

"I know this great little place, the Brew-Ha!," he told her, turning down another street. "I used to come here with Alexis every now and then. She'd always get a little hot chocolate with marshmallows and then she'd take the... It's a great place, anyway."

She liked when Castle told stories about when Alexis was younger, and she didn't quite know why. When she'd first met the writer, he was an arrogant, self-obsessed womaniser. Cocky. Disobedient.

And then she'd been forced to give him a chance, and she'd noticed that there were only a few things that brought out the best in him. His writing was one of them. His family was another. And as she grew to know the side of him that these two things belonged to, she'd also grown to develop feelings for him, which she'd then denied for a year and a half. And then, just as she'd been about to say it, Gina, his ex-wife of all people, had come in.

_Sound familiar?_, a little voice chirped inside her head. _Hadn't he been about to say something when your boyfriend showed up the other day?_

She forced the voice to the back of her head and focused on the quaint little cafe that Rick Castle had led her to. It wasn't what she had expected, which had been a bustling and popular morning coffee spot like a Starbucks, but instead was quiet, cosy, and was filled with the warming scent of coffee. She took a seat in one of the booths; a window next to it had checkered curtains which matched the tablecloth.

Castle didn't take long with the order, and joined her in enough time that it wasn't awkward.

"Why do I get the feeling that this isn't just coffee this morning?" she asked him, taking a sip of her normal order, and immediately realising why he'd brought her here. The coffee was about ten times better than where he usually got it from.

Castle frowned slightly. "Has it ever really been about just coffee?" he asked her quietly.

She chose not to answer that.

"I wanted to ask you something," he finally said, knowing that he would never be able to win a staring contest with Detective Beckett. She was a hard cop, a tough nut to crack, and she wouldn't let any semblance of emotion show on her face when she was set in her ways.

"Okay," she shrugged.

"And I want you to answer completely truthfully. I don't want you to lie if you think I'm going to be upset."

She glanced up at him, alarmed. What could he possibly ask her if he was going to be scared for receiving the answer? "Yeah, sure," she nodded, putting her coffee down.

Castle breathed in. "Do you love Josh?" he asked.

Her eyes widened and her mouth formed a small 'o' shape, before she looked into his eyes. And she realised that he was indeed being completely serious.

"Honestly?" she asked, and he nodded. "Yes," she sighed. "I do love Josh."

Castle shook his head sadly and started to get up.

Panicking, she put her hand on his arm to signal him to stay. "But I'm not in love with him," she said. "He's a great guy, he really is. And I love spending time with him. But you can't give your heart to someone when it already belongs to somebody else."

He searched her eyes to see if she was going to reveal any more. No luck.

"Are you going to stay?" Beckett asked, stirring her coffee.

He waited a moment before nodding once and sitting back down.

"Good."

The couple were silent for five minutes before she looked up at him, having finished her coffee. "Your turn," she said.

"For what?"

"For answering a question, truthfully. I don't care how much it'll hurt." After he didn't say anything, she assumed he wasn't going to put up a fight, and asked, "What were you going to say to me the other day, before Josh walked in?"

"Exactly what I did say," he said, looking down at his coffee.

"Castle, do I need to remind you that I'm an NYPD Detective?" she asked him.

"Well, whatever it was, it doesn't matter," he shrugged.

"If it didn't matter, you wouldn't have hidden it from me," she told him, holding her coffee cup and pretending to drink to look like she was doing something.

"It doesn't matter, though. You've got Josh, and I've got -"

"You've got a girlfriend?" Kate blurted out, hurt.

"No," Castle said, sensing the emotion. "I was going to say that I've got Alexis and she's all I need."

"Oh," she said, blushing furiously and pretending to take another sip of her empty coffee to hide her face. But Castle smiled softly to himself.

"Do you really want to know what I was going to say the other day?" he finally asked.

"Yes," she said quietly, not even daring to look anywhere near his face.

"It was the same as what I wanted to say to you in the quarantine tent; what I wanted to say to you in the freezer." He shivered unwillingly at the memory of how they'd almost frozen to death.

"What were you going to say?"

Her heart was beating faster now, adrenaline coursing through her as she thought of all the things he might say to her; that she'd been waiting for him to say to her for over a year now.

"That... it's ridiculous."

"Castle," she said, raising her eyebrows. She had that look on her face. The look that said she might shoot someone if she didn't start getting some answers soon. It was the same look that she had while questioning suspects in particularly aggravating murder cases.

"I was thinking that maybe we should dive into it, together," he mumbled.

"I'm sorry?" Kate asked. She'd heard him well enough. She was just wondering whether she'd heard what he'd said or what she'd wanted him to say. And Castle reflected that it was a funny thing that once you've said something you were terrified to say, you can say it again without feeling an ounce of fear. He repeated his statement, and put his hands on hers, looking straight into her eyes.

"Castle," she whispered, looking back into his.

"I've been skirting around these feelings that I have for you for so long because I knew it wasn't what you wanted," he started to explain. "You said you didn't want it, so I left you alone. And by the time I realised that you really did want it, I was with Gina. And then you must have gotten fed up with waiting and now you're with Josh. I don't think I'm ever going to be able to forgive myself for not going for it when I had the chance, but I want you to know, Kate, that I'm happy waiting for you – for forever, if that's how long it takes."

Kate smiled at him, happiness radiating off of her face, which interrupted him. "I've broken up with Josh," she said, leaning forward. "Did you know I was hinting at you when I said that?"

"I thought there was a slight possibility, but then I remembered who was saying it."

She narrowed her eyes at him as she grinned. And, teasingly, she kissed him on the cheek before whispering in his ear, "We should probably get back."

He nodded, slightly in shock that she'd accepted his suggestion so quickly and without any questions.

"You coming?" she asked, smiling slyly.

He grinned, grabbed his jacket, and sped after her, their hands finding their way to each other without their owner's noticing.


End file.
